Wednesday, November 22, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
A fistful of dollars
I’ve seen this man before.
He’s Mexican, late-mid-
dle-aged, soft-spoken, and
there is a guarded focus in his
eyes that betrays the uncer-
tainty of a life spent mostly
standing over a trap door. His
name is Armando.
A couple of years ago I
saw him ride down the road
on a bicycle, carrying a rake
in one hand like a lance.
He was riding door to door,
looking for work, but that
day he did not stop in at our
place.
Yesterday, he pulled into
our driveway at the wheel of
a used car. A Pontiac. I was,
as I usually am most morn-
ings, in my office working.
He was welcomed by our
dogs, who eagerly aban-
doned their obsession with
watching the chickens for the
prospect of a far more inter-
esting visitor. I went down to
meet him.
What Spanish I have
acquired came to me first
on the deserts of Nevada,
where I often rode and
worked with Mexicans, and
learned to string together a
sentence or two around the
things of ranch life. The sec-
ond baptism came in police
work, where I learned key
phrases such as “Show me
your hands,” and “Drop the
knife,” and “Why is there
a bag of meth in your cen-
ter console?” I said those
things often enough that I
will probably be muttering
them, to the consternation of
my nurses—who will likely
be Hispanic — in the day-
room of whatever raisin farm
I eventually end up in.
But Armando is a working
man, and after many mucho
gustos we worked through
the limits of our language
troubles and I found some
work that I needed done
— work that he wanted to
do because like all men, he
needs money, and unlike too
many of our fellow citizens,
he’s willing to work for it.
And it is, after all, almost
Christmas.
What stays with me in all
of this, and it’s something
I’ve thought about before,
is the tremendous admira-
tion I have for Armando, and
others like him, who find
themselves driven from their
homes and suddenly many
hundreds of miles away,
deep inside an alien country
and culture, without money,
without facility in the lan-
guage, and who nevertheless
have the sand to get out —
on a bicycle if necessary —
get busy, and try to make an
honest dollar.
It’s driven by necessity,
of course, that kind of pluck,
and no small measure of
courage, but there is also an
overwhelming combination
of humility and determina-
tion that we can all take a
lesson from. It is a mindset
and a vision of life that takes
nothing for granted. Nothing,
I daresay, in Armando’s adult
life has ever been given to
him. Not one single thing.
Which is exactly the place
where the abundance of our
culture, this leviathan of
entitlements and its attendant
attitudes — has become our
weakness. When people say
that immigrants are willing
to do work that Americans
won’t, they aren’t making
that up. It is probably no
accident that not a single
American citizen has ever
come around to our little
ranch with nothing but an old
rake and a tarp, willing to do
as much work as necessary
in return for a modest day’s
wage.
On one of my old beats
when I was a patrol officer
was the city’s labor line.
Each morning a hundred or
so people, mostly Mexicans
but plenty of Central
Americans too, would gather
to sit on the rock wall and
wait for contractors or pri-
vate citizens to come by and
offer work. It was also an
open drug bazaar and later,
when I become a narcotics
detective, we would stage the
occasional buy-bust opera-
tion to tamp down the brazen
commerce in rock-cocaine
and crystal meth. But these
were nuisance operations
— for us and for the dealers
— because neither of us had
any expectation that the trade
would end over the quick
spectacle of a few meaning-
less possession busts.
But there were men
there who were not a part of
that. These men were hon-
estly looking for work, and
worked honestly when they
found it. They were very,
23
very poor people, often living
20 or 30 to a house in appall-
ing circumstances. Later,
as a detective, I would go
into those places with some
frequency. Bedrooms were
sectioned off by hanging
bedsheets, the lights never
worked, there was often no
legitimate plumbing, and the
houses were filled with rats,
cockroaches, mold, and filth.
Their lives as refugees
and immigrants had filled
them with incredible stories
of hardship, desperation, and
no small amount of legiti-
mate, life-threatening danger.
They had come to America
seeking better lives, and
the lives they were living in
America were a window into
how truly bad things must
have been in the places they
came from.
It was possible to see
some of these men finally
disappear from the labor
line, which one hoped was
See BUNKHOUSE on page 31
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